Julia Child: Still cookin' after all these years - Salon.com Friday, Aug 20, 1999 4:00 PM UTC Julia Child: Still cookin' after all these years At 87, America's most famous and influential chef is about to serve up a new book and a new TV series, and again take us into her culinary embrace. Topics: Entertainment News I am surrounded by men and boys. We all sit with glowing screens in front of us, headphones on, viewing bits of history at New York City’s Museum of Television and Broadcasting. The guys are laughing their heads off at the Marx Brothers, Jack Parr and Jerry Seinfeld. But I am laughing loudest as I watch the first episodes of Julia Child’s “The French Chef.” “You must have the courage of your convictions,” trills a black-and-white Child as she pan-flips a large potato pancake. Losing half of the contents onto the electric range cooktop, she scrapes up the errant potatoes with her spatula and puts them back in the pan, assuring me, her momentary confidant, that it’s OK to make a mistake — no one sees us alone in the kitchen anyway.

As an adult, I find this reassuring. I, like Child, am not a natural born cook. Pre-Emeril, pre-Fat Ladies, long before the rise of Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower and Wolfgang Puck and without the magic of editing, Julia Child was re-outfitting the American kitchen and re-educating the American palate. In the process she became the most important culinary figure this country has produced, as well as one of the century’s most admirable women. As befits a woman who stands 6-foot-2, Child has done everything in a very big way. Raised in Pasadena, Calif., Julia McWilliams, privileged and mischievous (she once impressed her friends by scaling a fence to freedom after being apprehended for hurling mud pies at passing cars), was unfamiliar with the family kitchen, where a hired cook was in charge. She instead preferred playing in her family’s backyard tennis court, writing and performing plays and smoking her father’s cigars while hiding with her pals (McWilliams’ father found this hobby so distasteful he offered her a $1,000 bond if she promised to give up smoking until she was 21.

She took the deal, and after collecting the dough on her 21st birthday, began puffing away, as many as two packs a day for the next 30 years). Her career as a cut-up continued at Smith College, her mother’s alma mater. She played on the school’s basketball team, where she excelled at the “jump ball” portion of the game, and studied enough to get by. Equipped with a new 1929 Ford convertible, McWilliams ferried her all-girl crew to Prohibition-era speakeasies and found that driving with the top down was a benefit when one of the girls overindulged. Train trips home to California for holidays meant four-day cross-country parties during which McWilliams’ highly developed sense of fun kept everyone laughing. She later declared, “I was an adolescent nut. Someone like me should not have been accepted at a serious institution.” Nevertheless, she graduated from Smith and returned to California with ideas of becoming a lady novelist. Not yet a cook, but always a hostess, McWilliams was again the life of the party. But she was also the quintessential good citizen, volunteering with the Pasadena chapter of the American Red Cross until World War II broke out.

At a time when women were being told to get out of the kitchen and into the factories, McWilliams, who had never been in the kitchen in the first place, headed to Washington in a flurry of patriotism. Landing an administrative position with the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, she pushed papers by day and hosted cocktail parties by night. And when it was announced that volunteers were needed to staff new overseas bases, McWilliams lost no time signing up and departing for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) by way of India. After a month-long journey on the high seas with 3,000 soldiers, McWilliams, one of only a handful of women, arrived in Ceylon to begin her new job as a research assistant in America’s first intelligence organization. While the trip alone would’ve done in many, McWilliams was thrilled to be surrounded by sophisticated international spy-types. Soon promoted to administrator, she was required by her job to process highly confidential documents. While somewhat bored by deskwork, she was enthusiastic about being part of such an organization. The drudgery of the job was partly alleviated by the glamour of a top-secret clearance and the exotic location. Plus, she met Paul Child.

Having dated many of the OSS women, he had a reputation as both a loverboy and a lover of food. Although these were two areas the still-naive McWilliams knew little about, she and Paul Child struck up a friendship. As well as being an artist and photographer, multilingual and sophisticated, he was in charge of building the war room at the command. McWilliams found him extremely impressive. In their off hours, Paul Child would lead the staff on expeditions to local restaurants, sampling the local cuisine and avoiding the uninspired fare of the OSS mess hall. In Ceylon and later in Kunming, China, where they were both stationed next, McWilliams discovered the joy of eating. Almost better than that, she discovered the joy of talking about eating. She was intrigued by Paul and his smart circle of friends, and she never tired of listening to them consider the food they were eating or about to eat. A sensualist, Paul Child had lived in Paris and often described for McWilliams the rich and delicious French cuisine he loved. His talk of quenelles was hypnotic. McWilliams was smitten and, finally, so was Child. They married when they returned to the United States.

At the age of 34, Julia Child began learning to cook for her new, food-loving husband. As was the custom for new brides, Child referred to Irma Rombauer’s bestselling “The Joy of Cooking” for direction. Ever the optimist, she was not discouraged by her early failures in the kitchen. Paul Child soon accepted a government post in Paris and his wife’s life was transformed. Upon arriving, the couple immersed themselves in the national French pastime: eating. For Julia Child, to taste the food that had been so articulately described to her years before was a revelation. Diving into French culture, she shopped the markets, learned the language and got to know her neighborhood butcher. With her Michelin guide in hand, she explored Paris. She learned about cheese and drank wine. She later described herself as being “in hysterics for months” as her love affair with food became all consuming. Finally, at the age of 37, Child enrolled in Paris’ famed Cordon Bleu cooking school. The only woman in her class, she worked tirelessly. She tried out new dishes on her husband and outfitted her home kitchen with the tools of her new trade.

Her family fortune kept the couple supplied with truffles, and she entertained often, sometimes incapacitating friends with epic amounts of butter and cream. The owner of the Cordon Bleu thought she lacked natural cooking ability but had extraordinary stamina. In collaboration with two French foodies, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, Child formed “L’ecole des Trois Gourmandes” and began teaching French home cooking to American women in Paris. The students started early in the morning and worked until lunch, at which point they’d eat their lessons with wine. As she taught the classes, Child came to recognize the importance of dependable and accurate master recipes that would enable the students to produce consistent dishes. Taking recipes already assembled by her French partners, she began the arduous task of structuring, testing and rewriting them to fix flaws. As her husband’s career moved the couple around Europe, Child remained in constant contact with Simone Beck (known as Simca) by mail, working toward their goal of publishing a new and comprehensive French kitchen manual for an American audience. After nearly a decade, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I” was complete. The book made approachable a formerly intimidating and unpronounceable cuisine.

The textbook format, complete with diagrams, offered the “servantless American cook” an opportunity to adapt professional French techniques to the home kitchen. Child translated not only methods, but names — French Baked Beans sounded much more achievable, though less sexy, than the foreign and mysterious “cassoulet.” The book was a sensation and, along with more accessible airline travel, was significantly responsible for the American embrace of all things French that took hold in the 1960s. Soon after the book’s release, the Childs bought a house in Cambridge, Mass., and Paul Child, who possessed an all-consuming adoration for his wife, devoted himself to supporting her booming career, which was about to get even bigger. Child had been invited to appear on public television to promote her new book. With the idea that she’d demonstrate a dish from the book rather than just talk about it, she arrived at Boston’s WGBH studios toting eggs, a whisk and a hot plate. The studio had no cooking facilities, but Child proceeded to whip up an on-air omelet, which happens to be the perfect starring dish for TV: familiar, one main ingredient, and, in the hands of a trained professional, pure showmanship.

Taking only a couple of minutes to prepare, the illustrious omelet commanded a full 10 pages of text and detailed illustrations in Child’s book. The audience went wild. WGBH received letters demanding more of Julia Child and quickly asked her back to shoot a pilot. “The French Chef” series turned out to be public television’s greatest success, winning an Emmy in 1965. Child, always a staunch supporter of educational television, accepted payment of $50 for each show, donating the balance of her salary to the station. She’s an unlikely TV star, to say the least. Perpetually sounding as though she’d just gotten off the tennis court, and with an implacable, reedy accent, she fluttered about her TV kitchen. But her enthusiasm and can-do attitude were infectious, and the frequent gaffes offered opportunities to show the home cook how to repair a dish if it should stick or spill. Child had fun. Given to imagery (“the dough should feel like a baby’s bottom”) and colorful language (“use the electric mixer and go whole hog”), she preached the advantages of a modern, well-stocked kitchen. “The French Chef” was equal parts cooking instruction and performance art and it had wide appeal.

Housewives, college professors, foodies and non-foodies: Everyone loved Julia Child. Vogue magazine food writer Jeffrey Steingarten remembers rushing home from class at Harvard Law School to his black-and-white television and jotting down ingredients and instructions on his legal pad. Right after the show, he’d go to Savenor’s market “and I’d see Julia there. I’d stalk her in the aisles,” he says, his eyes twinkling. Child has starred in eight television series since then and published 11 books. She founded the American Institute of Wine and Food, an educational center devoted to the culinary arts. She has won too many awards to list. She is a unique American treasure who succeeded in a time when women supposedly couldn’t prosper in her notoriously sexist field. And, as with everything she has done, she did it all with great style and humor. Her influence cannot be overstated. Thirty years ago, Child raised the food consciousness of Americans and forever enhanced the sophistication of their appetites. When frozen convenience foods were standard fare in American homes, she proposed that we learn how to cook, and what’s more, how to eat.

Sara Moulton, executive chef of Gourmet magazine and host of the TV Food Network’s “Cooking Live,” says “Julia urged us to be more aggressive consumers, to go into our supermarkets and demand leeks and demand shallots. Now leeks and shallots are everywhere.” Moulton, a shining example of today’s TV chef, worked with Child on her second television series, “More Company.” “Cooking should be fun,” she says. “I learned that from the master. Julia didn’t just share what she knew. She made you want to do it to.” Legendary editor Judith Jones, Child’s editor since her first book, credits her with another important contribution. “She was the voice of sanity, and has remained the voice of sanity, telling us to eat a little of everything, stressing moderation; she’s like a voice in the wilderness.” Indeed, Child’s nutritional advice has always been sound.

Today, as books like “The Zone” and the suspect “Eat Right for Your Type” top the bestseller lists, Child, an energetic and healthy 87 years old, shows us that a joyful life of moderation may well be the key to longevity as opposed to a cranky existence without bread, potatoes or foie gras. This fall, Child will publish a new book edited by Jones, “Julia and Jacques Cook at Home,” in which she cooks alongside Chef Jacques Pepin. Besides offering back-to-basics instruction, it will feature a dialogue between the two culinary masters and illustrate the joy of taking a dish and making it one’s own, using a good recipe as a foundation. “This book is seminal in that it shows nothing is written in stone,” Jones says.

“Cooking isn’t fun if you simply stick to a formula.” Thanks to a new 22-part companion series for PBS, we will also soon see Child’s familiar frame in her familiar home kitchen, once again teaching us how to, among other things, “fearlessly boil up sugar into caramel.” Until then I’ll be watching reruns of “The French Chef” on the TV Food Network, observing with fascination as she clarifies chicken stock with egg whites in the classic French method, absorbed by her thoroughness as she describes different methods of making ice cream. She closes each show with a culinary fortune cookie, every bit as reassuring as when she long ago insisted, “You must have the courage of your convictions.” “Italian meringue is the sleeping beauty of this story,” she trills. “Take her into your culinary embrace. “Bon appetit!” Kathryn Kellinger works in New York with Vogue food columnist Jeffrey Steingarten and is also food stylist for the Metro Learning Channel.

14 Food TV Shows Actually Worth Watching | Bon Appetit 14 Food TV Shows Actually Worth Watching Written By Allen Salkin With the onslaught of a generation of TV food shows that seem to be vying for an Emmy in the category of Most Thoroughly Robbing Cooking of Dignity, Fun, and Good Health (I declare this season’s winner to be Cutthroat Kitchen: Superstar Sabotage Tournament, by the way), it can be restorative to recall the shows that were actually great. Ever heard of Justin Wilson? Well, how about David Rosengarten with his classic Taste? While I was researching my book on the history of Food Network , I found myself procrastinating with hours of these morsels. So turn off the shows that are presenting disasters like Philly Cheesesteak Egg Rolls on a Stick (sorry Food Network, we still love you!) and try these 14 still fun-to-watch food TV landmarks. You can still watch most of them right now! Home Grown with Justin Wilson Watch three minutes and 54 seconds of this and tell me you wouldn’t love to hang out in a kitchen with this dude while he cooks. I know that four minutes is longer than forever these days.

But Justin Wilson, host of Home Grown and other shows from the 1970s to the 1990s (some only airing on Southern public TV, some nationally through PBS), is the kind of Cosby-like storyteller who can bring you in and keep you rapt for an hour without you realizing a minute has passed. Famous in his day for his catchphrase “I gar-on-tee,” Wilson was a fount of wit, noting that the reason he wore both a belt and suspenders was, “There are some things you don’t want to leave to chance.” We haven’t even discussed his cooking: gumbo, hush puppies, Louisiana seafood. Unearth these treasures on YouTube , or see if you can find it on VHS , and forget your troubles for a spell. Isn’t that what cooking shows are for? Taste **For one episode of this show, which ran for the first seven years of the Food Network’s existence, David Rosengarten and director Josh White decided to demonstrate the aphrodisiac potency of oysters by bathing his set in purple light and having a giant amoeba-shaped light pulse as if it were experiencing orgiastic ecstasy.

True, the founding president of Food Network, Reese Schonfeld, was not amused. “How did you put a purple f---ing blob on my network?!” he screamed at Rosengarten afterward. But the former theater-studies professor’s spirit and his clever cooking tricks still make for good watching. As with many of its “classic” shows, Food Network continues to resist issuing Taste on DVD or digital download, perhaps because the contracts signed with talent were so amateurish during the startup years. You can taste some Taste here —or sign up for Rosengarten’s newly relaunched newsletter, The Rosengarten Report. Molto Mario When people complain that Food Network doesn’t offer anything but competition shows and Guy Fieri anymore, they are ignoring the bloc of daytime hours, when the network airs old-fashioned instructional cooking shows. Possibly the network’s greatest practitioner of this art was Mario Batali on the various incarnations of Molto Mario over the years. Right now, the seminal show is not being broadcast in the daytime rotation, nor can I find entire episodes anywhere online, but be assured that it is never off TV for long.

Who can resist watching Batali bestow history lessons about the various regions of Italy, relating it all to pasta shapes and flours, while doling out plates of steaming artistry to a rotating cast of guests who might include Anthony Bourdain or a relatively garrulous Ed Levine (the future founder of Serious Eats ). You can watch Batali any day of the week on The Chew, but to see a classic version of The Orange One, find a way to catch *Molto Mario—*even if only in this partial episode on You Tube , where he discusses the relationship between puttanesca and prostitution. First season of Tyler's Ultimate Shot on a set designed to look like the kitchen in Tyler Florence's real-life Lower East Side hipster bachelor pad, the show had an authenticity Florence has not matched since. When I asked him about the pizza episode, where he is taught by a master, Giavanna Raffoni, in her Naples apartment, he got goose pimples on his arms remembering the taste of those smoked tomatoes. The enthusiasm and joy he felt at being paid to travel around and learn how to cook delicious food comes through the screen to this day.

Avoid the later seasons, when Food Network kept a tighter rein on Tyler following his $3 million Applebee's endorsement deal, and nixed the travel component. Off the road, it became a ho-hum product. Food Network is running episodes of Tyler’s Ultimate on Monday mornings. Keep an eye out for the pizza episode—the official Food Network code of this episode is TU1A08, which may help your search. The Frugal Gourmet Yes, Jeff Smith was a mess, possibly of the worst kind. Do read David Kamp’s amazing and essential The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation for a well-rounded account of the alleged crimes of this troubled man. But let us not forget that Smith was a hugely influential TV star, his cookbooks of the 1980s and 1990s far outselling Julia Child’s. With history lessons about ingredients that were a forerunner to Molto Mario, and recipes nearly as clear to follow as Ina Garten’s, Smith taught me and a lot of other Gen Xers how to cook whenever we tuned into PBS. I haven’t seen his show broadcast anywhere in more than a decade, but Hulu has him. Emeril Live!

Bottom line: You might not believe it, but you are probably reading this because of Emeril Lagasse, who melded the worlds of entertainment and cooking like no one had before. Watch an episode of this 1997-2007 series and be amazed at how excited people were that a man used as much garlic as he wanted. Bam! Using music, fire, and his serious chops as a chef, Lagasse mesmerized and energized audiences both in the studio and at home, imperfectly but consistently. The promise that chefs could be the new rock stars, a concept invented by Emeril’s then-agent Shep Gordon (who also represented ghoul-rocker Alice Cooper), was driven home by Emeril Live! (which was not broadcast live but taped in front of a live audience). Cooking Channel puts episodes into the cable rotation now and then. As I’m writing this, you can find some episodes on You Tube on cooking with beer and comfort food , or with celebrity guest Pat Benatar.

(It’s not quite the same, but the early episodes of Essence of Emeril —pick the ones with black-and-white tile in the background—make for vintage fun on Hulu even without a studio audience.) The Naked Chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution was a landmark show for a major U.S. broadcast network when it ran from 2010 to 2011, helping lead to improvements in school lunch programs nationally. When Oliver burst on the TV scene in the 1990s, he was a new type of chef for mass media. Chef Marco Pierre White, with his beard and his meat-forward cuisine, was the chef’s chef of the era. But for many, the first appearance of the tousled young hipster chef, playing drums in a band, cooking in his little apartment for his hot girlfriend, was the shaggy blond Jamie Oliver with his “naked” cuisine, named for its simplicity by producer Patricia Llewellyn, the same brilliant woman who created and named Two Fat Ladies. Hulu plus subscribers can catch it all. Or try DVD.

Two Fat Ladies Like all of the best TV shows ever, there is no reason on the surface that this show should have worked: Two not-young, not-svelte Englishwomen who prattle about the drafty countryside on a motorcycle and sidecar, cooking breath-destroying traditional cuisine such as deviled kidneys, and adding as much lard, Stilton, and anchovy as possible to everything. They make rude jokes—a reference to the anal-sex scene in Last Tango in Paris while buttering a baking dish is particularly memorable—speak in trills that make Julia Child sound like Barry White, and seem always ready to bite the heads off anything that appears delicious. There is an authenticity and humanness to these characters no marketing department or consultant could ever instill. Its lack of freshness is the freshest thing about it. God bless the British executives who greenlit this show in the 1990s, and God bless Joe Langhan, the Providence, Rhode Island, cable exec who started Food Network and made the deal to bring Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright to American TV, providing some of the funds that allowed the show to keep filming—yes, it was shot on film. Expensive!

YouTube has a a great selection of Fat Ladies videos. Or you can buy an official collection from Amazon . A Cook’s Tour Many interviewers are surprised when I remind them that Anthony Bourdain’s first TV series was broadcast on Food Network. When the network executives approached him in the wake of the success of his book Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain did not believe it likely that the television home of Emeril, whom he had called “an Ewok” in print, would actually want to do a show with him. But there was still some creative ambition at Food Network and, with Bourdain about to start researching a new book to be called A Cook’s Tour, a deal was made. It didn’t last. Episodes of the show found Bourdain sampling cobra heart, traveling to the Mekong delta, and pursuing his interest in Apocalypse Now by visiting a reputedly dangerous village in Cambodia. It was wonderful, but new Food Network executives told Bourdain he was getting better ratings when visiting barbecue joints in the American South. When they asked him to focus domestically and refused to fund a visit to Ferran Adria’s legendary laboratory of techno-emotional cuisine, El Bulli, Bourdain, to his everlasting credit, bailed.

Thanks to Hulu, you can now visit the two seasons of episodes of A Cook’s Tour , where it all started. Do give Food Network some credit, though, for starting what has become an amazing run of Bourdain television. Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home You could watch Julia Child’s original, revered, groundbreaking, omelet-slipping, chicken-trussing, world-changing original show The French Chef, as you’ve either done or been told to do countless times. Or you could spend time with the master of French cooking instruction himself, Jacques Pepin, on one of his many PBS endeavors. Instead, slay two legendary birds with one click by treating your brain’s fantasy cortex to the pair doing their thing together. Your visual and taste synapses will engage in a dance that will inexorably cause you to pull out your cooking twine to prepare leg of lamb, or to head to the grocery for cauliflower for Pepin's gratin. This is why food TV first entranced people: They were watching interesting people make things that looked good to eat and were presented with incredible sweetness, gentle music, and nothing but an obvious desire to generously share a little miracle which can be performed at home. Hulu has it.

Yan Can Cook What’s especially interesting about Martin Yan ’s joke-filled Asian cooking half-hour is that its debut in 1978 signaled the start of an era of cooking programs focused on cuisines other than French and Italian. Yan created a symphony with his cleaver on the cutting board, and, according to Kathleen Collins’s excellent and deeply researched book Watching What We Eat:The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows , available on Amazon , this show was one of the first to truly address “the wealth of cultures in the U.S.,” leading to other landmarks like Nathalie Dupree’s New Southern Cooking and (bringing it to the present) New Scandinavian Cooking. To view Martin’s series, you need to fire up the old VCR and buy a tape. Holiday Entertaining with Martha Stewart The popularization of “tablescapes,” and of television that focused on aspects of a meal other than the cooking of it can be traced back to Martha Stewart’s 1986 debut on PBS. She does cook, but more importantly, she presents. Scroll forward to the 2:28 mark for this very short promo for the special, read about the filming of it, or check out a VHS tape from a local library.

James Beard’s various shows The in-production documentary about Beard is called America’s First Foodie. It's fascinating viewing for any professional or amateur scholar of food television to experience some of the first cooking shows ever broadcast, including many shows from the late 1940s and 1950s, like I Love to Eat, that celebrated American cuisine, which had long been looked down upon. Few episodes are known to still exist, so, for now, watch a few snippets of original James Beard in this promising trailer for the documentary . The Surreal Gourmet The one show I wish I had included in my book but did not find room for was Bob Blumer's weird-before-weird-wasn’t-so-weird show, which was a favorite of Food Network’s gutsy marketing chief Heidi Diamond, but never caught on big with viewers. (Possibly because Diamond left the network and the new regime had less of an appetite for weird. See Bourdain above.) Dishwasher Salmon? A lobster pie shaped like a bed? Sample The Surreal Gourmet at this upstart video streaming site . (Previews are free.) Editor's Note: This show technically hasn't aired yet, but we're pretty sure Best New Restaurant is gonna be just great.

Oh, and did we mention we're partnering with Bravo on it? Now watch some of our own food TV here: See More History of Culinary Schools History of Culinary Schools History of Culinary Schools Until the nineteenth century, Culinary Schools did not exist. Recipes and cooking techniques were created and shared with friends and family members and then passed along to younger generations. As the function of eating progressed from a source of survival to a source of pleasure, unofficial chefs—people who served the tastiest dishes in their communities—took the role of informal cooking teachers by sharing their recipes. The Boston Cooking-School opened as the first official culinary school in the United States during the 1800s. This institution taught students how to cook and unofficial chefs and other instructors how to teach the art of cooking. Fanny Merritt Farmer is the most famous graduate of the Boston Cooking-School. In 1896, Farmer published The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, the first official culinary textbook and still considered “the bible” of American cookbooks. It features 1,849 of Farmer’s original recipes including a multitude of American traditional classics such as corned beef hash, baked Alaska, strawberry shortcake, lobster bisque, and stuffed peppers.

The next major advance in American culinary arts took place in 1929 with the creation of the American Culinary Federation (ACF), an organization founded by three chef organizations: the Societe Culinaire Philanthropique, the Vatel Club, and the Chefs de Cuisine Association of America. The ACF is the authority in developing and implementing guidelines for quality and excellence for all Culinary Schools and Institutions. The mid-twentieth century brought the introduction of chefs as celebrities with esteemed chef, James Beard. In 1946, he hosted “I Love to Eat,” the first cooking show on television. He also launched a cooking school from his New York home, where he taught for thirty years. Beard paved the way for future celebrity chef TV shows, including Julia Child in the 1960s and her Emmy Award-winning show, “The French Chef,” as well as the current incarnations of cooking shows, reality series programming, and competitions offered on the “All-Food-All-The-Time” Food Network. Another banner culinary event took place in 1946 with the launch of the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in New York.

This school arose from the growing need for career and business training that allowed chefs to transition from brilliant culinary artists to brilliant culinary artists with a paycheck. The CIA is still considered the gold standard of all culinary educational institutions. Over the years, more culinary programs and schools popped up all over the states, some Culinary Institutes such as The Cordon Bleu Schools, Art Institutes, and French Culinary Institute, some as dedicated programs offered at universities and community colleges. In 1973, culinary arts achieved official college-graduate status with the first Bachelor of Arts Degree in culinary sciences offered through the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University. Watching What We Eat: a History Of Tv Food Shows | Epicurious.com | Epicurious.com Watching What We Eat: A History of TV Food Shows by Michael Y. Park on 04/03/09 at 08:56 AM It was arguably the most influential medium of the 20th century, but television sure doesn't get a lot of respect from most people, much less serious scholar types.

And among TV shows, food shows have long been relegated to the back of people's minds along with extended commercials for tomato sauce and having to spend time with your fusty grandmother canning beets. But food shows are finally getting notice, and author Kathleen Collins has made their place in television history official by writing a fun and informative book about how they got to this point, in " Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows. " What show today strikes the right balance between having personality and being useful? What could today's shows learn from those food programs of yesteryear? Which modern food-show personality would you like to see Julia Child take on in the boxing ring, and who would win? Find out how Kathleen Collins answered these puzzlers in our Q&A with her, after the jump. (Full disclosure: I've known Kathleen for about 14 years; at one point we batted around the idea of co-hosting an hour-long TV show called 'Things We Hate." I think it would've been a hit.) The development of the food show was about trying to strike the perfect balance between being informative and entertaining, practically relevant and a form of projected escapism.

Which food show on today do you believe is closest to finding that balance, if any? If you really like cooking, you'll probably find them all entertaining, and anyway I think "entertainment" is subjective. On the Food Network, everybody's teaching and entertaining in different proportions, though of course the more competition and combat involved, the less time there is for explaining or demonstrating recipes. If you love Rachael Ray's personality, she gives very practical, do-able tips and recipes. I think Alton Brown does a great job of teaching on "Good Eats." He's like the science guy of food TV, he cooks while he's at it, and he's just got a great personality so he's easy on the ears. He does it all. What could some of our newer food shows learn from the early radio and TV food shows? How nice of you to ask! I get the feeling today's producers aren't thinking that way. I'll go to the grave saying that food and cooking shows keep us coming back because we like to learn. I understand how and why they've become entertainment-ized to a great degree, but I think it's risky to go too far from their original mission.

The Food Network does a good job of giving takeaway tidbits of information ... that may be as much as crazy busy us can handle these days. Which meal from any cooking show of the past do you most wish you could actually have enjoyed with the chef in the studio right after the taping had ended? Julia Child got tons of fan mail telling her how painful it was not to be able to sit down at that dining table with her at the end of every "French Chef" episode. There's no question that that would be my number one choice, too. You saw her cook the food, all fresh, high quality stuff, from scratch and serve it right before our eyes. There were empty chairs around her at the table. It was torture! Just set me a place with Julia and whatever she's serving, and I'd be in heaven. Have you ever tried to make any of the dishes you watched? Has your cooking improved after watching countless hours of TV food shows? I don't remember ever trying a specific recipe from any "French Chef" show because I was young and the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking were pages long.

But Julia Child inspired me to cook (well, bake) and I remember making fudge and Florentines and checkerboard cookies when I was a tween. The recipes were really too complicated for a kid, but I didn't realize that. They mostly came out OK as I recall. As an adult, my cooking hasn't improved creatively as a result of watching cooking shows because I tend to make the same boring things over and over, but I do think I retain the takeaway bits that I see and hear and maybe I make fewer mistakes with temperature and things like that. The way you've structured your book, you could argue that the evolution of TV food shows is like the making of a dish, and that every new era in TV food shows has added its own ingredient to the final meal. What would you like to see added in the 2009-and-beyond era? And when do you think we'll finally get to eat? Hey, I hadn't realized that ... good point! Molly O'Neill talks in the last chapter about the future of cooking on TV and I like what she says: "The cultural quest, yearning is for real, tangible, not puffed up, not artificial.

And I think that will very much shape what our next generation of television looks like." I think we just might see somewhat of a backlash against the glitz and glam of the modern shows. The struggling economy might be a push in the scaled-down direction, too. I'm not sure. It's hard to take away from something that seems to work really well, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Personally, I hope the reality TV sub-genre loses its luster pretty soon. As for smellivision and tasteivision, I don't want it. I never really embraced scratch 'n sniff stickers or Jelly Bellies. I want the real thing or bust. Which modern TV food personality would you like to see Julia Child get into a fistfight with, and who would win? She could take anybody! Her size helps, but I think her whole persona would just make others melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West. I don't want to see her whack anybody, but I wouldn't stop her if she twisted the skin on Sandra Lee's upper arm really really hard. You have your own hour-long TV cooking show. What's on the menu for the first episode? Who are your guests?

Let's call it "Watching What We Eat" because it's such an excellent title given to the book by my friend Tim Kinnel. I would like it to be hosted by my friend Adam Ried because he's already good friends with the camera from his days on America's Test Kitchen. He's smart, funny and totally competent and creative in the kitchen. Occasionally we'd have on smart folks who bust stupid nutrition myths and tell people never to diet. We'd have one celeb guest for the whole show and talk and cook at the same time, and everything would be from scratch and based on what was in season and all that stuff. The celeb would be cooking with Adam, and I would sit around on the side and talk and eat with them. The first guest would be President Obama, and we'd film in the White House kitchen and cook with vegetables from their garden. Your cooking show has become so popular they're filming a feature movie about your life. Who plays you? Who plays the chefs you interviewed?

Most importantly, who plays me, the billionaire playboy and international superspy who interviews you as he stumbles upon a terrifying conspiracy by media-mogul vampires to feast on the well-fed humans who show up at tryouts for reality cooking shows? Frances McDormand plays the current me, and the young Jodie Foster would play the tween me. All the chefs I interviewed would be played by themselves. You can pick who plays you but I could suggest Stephen Colbert because he has a superspy, evil air about him that is irresistible. What did you have for dinner last night? Turkey meatballs, mashed potatoes and salad. That's as complicated as it gets. Chopping onions and parsley is time-consuming.

Question: What influential show, which paved the way for the future of cooking shows on TV, was hosted by Julia Child?
Answer: The French Chef